Color? Colour?

 

Does anyone know what color my car is?

Because I don't.

Gar-den

Mother's day weekend is typically when I put in the garden. I prepped the land earlier in the week and took the time that Saturday to get my seedlings in the dirt and the extra fencing up. The wife also got us a pair of cherry trees to plant, so some of the fertilizer was set aside for those. I was ten minutes away from finishing when I felt a sudden cold front move in (we could see it on the horizon, I knew it was going to rain). In fact, I was just barely getting my tools inside when the rain came.

I appreciate not having to water, I suppose. Problem is, it hasn't stopped raining since.

My plants need sunlight and water. Water and sunlight. I haven't seen sunlight since the morning of the 10th, it's been cloudy and raining the entire time. It's a bit lopsided over here.

Logged out of work

Last week I got to work and tried logging into the customer portal, and it said I didn't have access. I could do nothing. Heck, I couldn't even submit a ticket, you have to log in to do that. All I could do was send them an email and wait. Meanwhile, the others in the office had to do that part of the paperwork while I did internal stuff.

After a few days, I got a reply. My login was terminated because my email was not considered secure. I was using a Gmail account for my login, but I've also been using it for over three years. I had no warning, and I have no recourse.

Getting an email account on the same domain the rest of the company is using is time consuming, and I had exactly two days to get into the system and get trained before I was the only person at work that could do that job. Gmail was a fast way to get in, and it worked. It worked for three and a half years, and I had zero warning before getting ejected from the system.

I informed management, and they went about trying to get me a new email address on the company domain. Time passes. Nothing happened. A week goes by, nothing happens. I speak with our outsourced I.T. guy. The next day I'm good to go.

I was bringing up my issues with the wrong people. Lesson learned.

The battery

Apparently, when you change the battery on a Kia Sorrento, you have to keep power on the terminals or the computer goes haywire. Not that its causing issues, it just thinks there are issues, so the check engine light comes on and won't turn off until you drive it awhile until the car realizes nothing's wrong.

Jack didn't know this about that particular car. He's a one man show, so I can forgive that. But he's also a dealer, so he can't sell a car without a valid inspection sticker. And nobody can sign off on an inspection with a check engine light. And you can't clear the light if it's not showing any codes (which it wasn't). So he's got to drive the car for awhile until it clears.

Whoops.

Meanwhile, I had taken everything out of my old car and I have this bag of stuff sitting in my basement. Looking at it, I realized that over the past six years I've just been tossing stuff into the various compartments thinking it might be handy sometime.

Spoiler alert: most of it hasn't.

The little solar powered flashlight? Used that. The bag of disposable masks from the pandemic? Get outta here.

My problem is I can see the value in things without seeing the necessity. So now I have to figure out what to do with three fourths of this stuff.

The replacement

My grandfather's neighbor, Jack, is a car dealer. He was already aware of my problem, and when I stopped over we got to talking and asked if the car I was borrowing from my parents was my new car.

Yea... I never returned it. They let me hang on to it rather than get gassed out driving my automotive corpse.

Long story short, he had a car on hand he was looking to sell. I'll spare you the details, suffice it to say it's in great shape and I was able to pay cash.

I've been asked what color it is. Honestly I don't know. Some kind of greyish silverish tannish... idk.

Pending repairs

It's been two hundred days since the bike accident. I had my last appointment for my wrist on Monday - the x-ray showed that it was finished healing. My elbow pops when I hold it in one place for too long, but I just don't do that, so it's fine. The surgery scar faded, the colors match the rest of my wrist. You can miss it if you look too fast.

Last week I packed up all the winter stuff into the shed in the back, and pulled out the summer stuff into the shed up front. The other day I mowed the lawn for the first time this season. (Alright seriously, every single time I was home and could do it, it was raining. It was getting long). But one thing broke that day that hasn't been fixed yet.

The bike.

The right handlebar was still loose and slipped off easily. The left handlebar impacted and dragged on the pavement, and it was all torn up. The handlebars were misaligned, but that's an easy fix. The gears took a hit somehow and they rattled when I moved it. I'm taking it to a pro to get it looked at. Cosmetic damage and functionality can be dealt with, but that handlebar...

I want assurances. I want to know why it failed and how that can be prevented again. I honestly can't see myself riding that bike again unless I know why the accident happened in the first place. And I want to ride that bike again.

Taxing trips

Tax season ended Tuesday, Wednesday was a breather, and Thursday we were out of town for a long weekend. The wife wanted to take the family out to Kirtland Ohio to see the church history sites. 

Like this one

In the past when we traveled, we needed one hotel room. Now, with the six of us and their increasing sizes, we need two. Now for some odd reason, the hotels in the middle of nowhere Ohio were strangely expensive. Prohibitively so. I worked in hotels for a long time, I can understand spikes in the prices, but they usually followed things like concerts, festivals, or solar eclipses. (Yes, every hotel in town was booked solid)

I checked. Nothing was happening. I couldn't explain it, so... whatever. We went camping instead. Now for clarification, we didn't go camping. We were staying at a campground. We had all the gear, and we're experienced, so this was nothing. Except... the first night it was almost too cold, and the second night it was almost too hot. Being fully prepared meant bringing twice as much clothing as you would have expected.

Oh, and my second born son fell off a dock into a lake. Everyone, him included, got a solid laugh out of that. At least it happened at the end of the day, so he could just shower off and slip right into some pajamas.